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After Jamuse Records favourable outcome, the Swiss label is delighted and honored to unveil its latest vinyl release featuring the talented Romanian artist Lumieux.

Titled "Gemini Road," this EP consists of three tracks. The title track presents a captivatingly glitchy and rhythmic style, adorned with warm sub-bass and distinctive vocal elements. The offbeat rhythm adds a unique touch that sets the track apart.The offbeat rhythm adds a unique touch that sets the track apart. "Fuzzy Formats" skilfully blends human and robotic voices with beats, accompanied by inviting warm bass and crisp treble notes.Bringing the EP to a captivating conclusion, "Lemesleep" takes listeners on a hypnotic adventure enriched by evocative pads and skillfull glitches.

In its entirety, "Gemini Road" guides your auditory senses on a mesmerizing journey through the realms of magical minimal house music. This sonic voyage is not solely characterized by its warm sub-bass and glitchy elements but also by its diverse and eclectic textures. Lumieux's inspirational touch is the driving force behind this EP, elevating it to a gem within its genre.

The colossal Caposile Music strike once more with a heavy hitting house EP. This sought after summertime jam comes from resident and long time family member, Maggio. The flourishing Italian talent enforces the driving force that is After Caposile with three driven and animated grooves for the peak hours of the party. Accompanying him with a stellar remix is acclaimed live performer and producer, Vitess, the Frenchman showcasing his consistent sound, living up to the Caposile ethos with great effect.

This is “Discoline”.

Title track “Discoline” cruises on an irresistible elastic groove, shimmering synths and pads shine bright, breathing life into the rolling structure of the track. This one living and breathing a pure and infectious summer time energy. Packing a serious punch is “Vertigo”, built upon crisp drum arrangements and another dynamite bass line for the heads. If you are looking to go up a gear on the floor then you are in the right place.

On the B side Maggio’s “Outer Space” leads the way. The aptly named track prepares you for lift off with its distinctive chugging, sub heavy bass. Sprinkles of spaced out vocals tease you down a path of curiosity. Vitess rounds off the EP with another recipe for dance floor frenzy in his remix of “Discoline”, playful yet effective frequencies to ignite the flight, an essential for the record bags of many in the coming months.

CPSL005 lands off the back of the “Sound Of Garden” volumes 1 and 2, and with this latest addition to the catalogue it ensures the label and club continue to cement themselves at the forefront of the scene for underground minimal and house, continuing to spread like wildfire. Become part of the Caposile family this summer with some sincere day time action from within their circle.

Elkka’s deep intuition is the unifying thread throughout Cardiff-born DJ and producer’s illustrious career. Vibrant releases for Local Action, Ninja Tune and her own label and party, femme culture, have marked her as an unstoppable force within the London underground.

This recognition metabolised when she was awarded BBC’s prestigious Essential Mix of the Year in 2021, spotlighting her radiant blend of classic house, breakbeat and experimental electronica to the world over.

As the next curator of DJ-Kicks, Elkka is voyaging through rave euphoria. “This is a really special moment for me because DJ-Kicks has been a formative part of my musical education,” she says.

An intoxicating journey through Chicago house and disco, leftfield techno, UK bass and electro-punk, Elkka conjures up an atmosphere that is as primed for the club as it is the listener’s interior world.

Lobster Theremin ambient sub-label Lobster Sleep Sequence announce their double LP + 7” album from Dutch producer nthng - featuring a limited run of copies on deep green vinyl. Themed around events in the artist's life, Unfinished is a deeply personal journey, yet there’s something very relatable to the world he has conjured. Lockdown has forced us to look inward, explore realities within ourselves and the fragility of our forgotten world. The album is a series of peaks and troughs - hopeful words, ominous tones and other-worldly soundscapes, giving way to a journey in no way linear - but a true reflection of our times. The title track sets the scene perfectly, while Son features deep bass notes, dreamy keys and spoken word - creating a visceral and unsettling scene. Subnautica resides in the fringes of ambient and techno - as tribalistic drums are suspended in our new rendered reality.

The marching bass and howling synths of Wrath of the Demon lull conspicuously in a vacuum, while the hauntingly beautiful vocals featured on Disappeared But Not Forgotten evoke a poignant, powerful reaction across the record’s B-side - “Everything stopped, you just disappeared...”

At its most tranquil Our Time offers a sense of rest - a space to appreciate, as we leave the window open, peer outside and feel the gentle breeze brush across our face. Saafe continues this theme, and feels like a warm embrace - “She saved my life in a matter of speaking, when she gave me back the power to believe.”

Ending Theme is beautifully organic as you hear the sound of the piano pedal touch the floor, tones are introspective and vulnerable - while the looming presence of uncertainty subtly takes form in thinly layered pads.

The album also sees the release of a digi only bonus track Only a Flash of Light and invites you outside while the stars are at their brightest.

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If you decide to look up the strict definition of outsider in any dictionary, you'll find that the term is understood as "a person who is not involved with a particular group of people or organization or who does not live in a particular place".

Perhaps this is the most accurate description of Santiago Merino. For a long decade and from his native Medellín, this DJ and producer has always tried to keep his sonic spectrum open. An interdisciplinary artist capable of freely navigating through a myriad of genres is rarely encountered, and that may be the reason why Santiago enjoys a non-negotiable respect in the different scenes that make up the music circuit of his city. On this occasion, Back Door Records is pleased to serve as host to receive one of the most anticipated facets within the range of music produced by this Colombian artist.

The Outsider marks the debut of a new project signed by Merino, a new hunch in which house takes the helm of an EP entitled 4 Club Use. Composed of five tracks, 4 Club Use seems to show us the true essence behind a genre that has almost been trivialized over the years. In this case, El Outsider decided to take the basic ingredients of tech house to produce a recipe much richer in flavors, textures and melodies. "Fire People", for example, leaves the window open for the airs of Detroit techno to come in and cool off any sunny afternoon. "Outsider" and "The Heat", on the other hand, are seasoned by the purest amen breaks, as if it were a blessing intended solely for the dance floor.

But the real deal across 4 Club Use is definitely El Outsider's own edit of Merino's track "Those Days". Raw and forceful kicks, meticulously sampled vocals and pads that seem to wrap them magically, make this bomb one of the candidate tracks to take the absolute podium of 2023.

Mathis Ruffing’s Transatlantic debut cuts to the chase. This is getaway music, music designed to vaporise your long-dormant adrenal glands. ‘Skybox’ is made up of tracks that surge like quicksilver through veins, pulsing, flexing, relentlessly disciplined in execution. These tunes are crystalline and shimmering, eight sleek and streamlined club constructs rendered with what feels like the precision-engineering of some advanced alien DAW.

Opener ‘Ultranova’ hits like a cyborgian headbutt and refuses to let up. It’s followed by the one-two punch of the title track and ‘Hitherto’, which install cooling, gaseous pads and synths within breakneck drum&bassian exoskeletons. ‘Crater Edge’ and closer ‘Raytraced’ offer cryochamberesque respite from the cold-blooded fury enclosed within this release — well-earned breathing room in an album that takes hold with crisp and calculated force. Pure focus.

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The debut collaboration between techno alchemists Ben Klock and Lucy will probably provoke quivers of anticipation before a single note has been heard. After all, both producers have carved out names for themselves as scene innovators at what they do, and both have already proven that they can more than capably work in a duo format without sacrificing an iota of their unique aesthetics: in Lucy's case, there has already been the sublime Zeitgeber pairing with Speedy J., and Klock has joined forces with the likes of Marcel Dettmann to craft some of the more memorable output from the Ostgut Ton label. This new release makes good on each producer's talent for working with epically unfolding tracks, maintaining a strong command of both 'drone' and melodicism, and envisioning sound as a kind of inter-dimensional mass transit. As the record indicates, things can get very interesting when the two working methods superimpose perfectly, but can be just as interesting when the two fall slightly out of phase with one another.



Listeners familiar with the classic kosmische feel will be taken immediately by the opening gambit "Bliss," whose feeling of floating through the coldness of space is accompanied here by nicely warm production values. The bassline that introduces the subsequent track ("War Lullaby") is close to being a continuation of the opener's leitmotif sequence, although with a change in atmosphere that will keep curious ears from turning away too soon: an FX-shrouded voice delivers a monologue at once seductive and foreboding, followed by a confident kick thump with ephemeral trailing clatters in tow. This affective orientation pulses through the whole record well, building up to the second rhythmic track ("Santeria") which is the busiest and most engaging of the bunch. Here a variety of sonic flavorings are ritually thrown into the pot and allowed to simmer - fleeting snatches of conga, phasing zaps and rhythmic ricochets all make for a rich concoction that epitomizes the progress that has been made in techno music within this decade. The closing "A Ghost Love story," like the opener, is a non-'dance' piece, but is no less compelling for that fact: as a foam of white noise pans between the listener's ears, a slurred / pitch-bent refrain conjures the feeling of either entering or exiting from some erotically tinged hypnagogic state.



Speaking of which, the overall impression given off by this record is that of a special kind of reciprocity: that is, of dreams influencing reality and reality feeding back into dreams. The rhythmic intensity of these tracks, at once an indicator of a hard and immediate reality, is regularly complemented by oneiric flourishes that make the partitioning line between these two realms of consciousness less distinct. As the next chapter in the Stroboscopic Artefacts saga, and in the personal journeys of both Ben Klock and Lucy, it will contribute to the ongoing mission of all these parties: giving longtime fans what they want while expanding their consciousness and inquisitiveness.

Razor-N-Tape Reserve presents a very special new package of remixes of the band BaianaSystem, bringing together one of Brazil’s most exciting contemporary sounds with modern dancefloor-minded production.

The standout track of their 2018 LP 'O Futura Não Demora', Água is a lyrical poem to the people of their native Bahia, featuring the legendary Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, with orchestral melodies, an incendiary vocal chant, and traditional organic Brazilian rhythmic approach.

On the A side, Freerange boss Jimpster delivers two exceptional takes on the song, augmenting percussion and adding synth layers to create deep and hypnotic tribal house textures within a sublime sonic soundscape.

On the flip side Brazilian producer Diogo Strausz joins forces with RNT boss JKriv to highlight the symphonic and melodic elements with their vocal mix, and then go into dark and driving percussive electronic territory on their fiery dub. With stunning visual art realized by Costa Rican designer The Myno, this package is as essential and smooth as water!

When the first Placid Angels album dropped in 1997, John Beltran was already an established force within dance music’s then-emerging scene. He had a knack for both the melodic side as well as intricately designed rhythmic programming. A signature style that went for his early records in the 1990s as much as it does for this new installment of the Placid Angles series. The blissful synths, Aphex Twin-era IDM and loose percussive patterns take you right back to where it all began when genres didn’t mean anything and Beltran was just starting out to experiment with any sound that would elevate your consciousness. The Michigan-born artist since has spanned a career of nearly four decades, remaining relevant all the while, by playing the music he found himself most drawn to express. By working with artists like Detroit veteran Carl Craig, labels such as R&S or more recently his LPs for Delsin or his joint work with Four Tet. Whether it be his more Techno-leaning or New Wave-inspired works, his takes on Ambient, or the more Latin-influenced productions - he has always stayed active and re-invented himself while painting his records with a clearly own palette that is full of beautiful melodies and a timeless sound-design. The album Touch The Earth itself comes as diverse as the artist’s own legacy, ranging from skittish, colorful UKG to proper pulsing sub-basslines as it progresses deeper into intelligent drum programming and further into the melodic ventures of what’s at the core of Beltran’s work.

Now in its second decade, with a steady stream of the most forward thinking and cutting edge techno productions, Drumcode has one of the biggest selections of releases from industry heavy hitters, whilst not forgetting its future by bringing the newest talented producers into the limelight, where Layton Giordani is now a name firmly within that line up.
The young New York based producer first had recognition back in 2014, and his debut release came via Drumcode with his track "Rivington" on the A-Sides Vol5 compilation in 2016.
Full force into 2017, Drumcode has announced the release of Layton's debut album with "Where It Begins" Consisting of 12 original tracks, the album packs a punch when it comes to no-nonsense techno. Successfully weaving relentless drums and catchy vocal hooks into a selection of thick, brooding, atmospheric tracks.

Now in its second decade, with a steady stream of the most forward thinking and cutting edge techno productions, Drumcode has one of the biggest selections of releases from industry heavy hitters, whilst not forgetting its future by bringing the newest talented producers into the limelight, where Layton Giordani is now a name firmly within that line up.
The young New York based producer first had recognition back in 2014, and his debut release came via Drumcode with his track "Rivington" on the A-Sides Vol5 compilation in 2016.
Full force into 2017, Drumcode has announced the release of Layton's debut album with "Where It Begins" Consisting of 12 original tracks, the album packs a punch when it comes to no-nonsense techno. Successfully weaving relentless drums and catchy vocal hooks into a selection of thick, brooding, atmospheric tracks.

After the acclaimed Bar Mediterraneo, Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina return with People Of The Moon, expanding their sound into a space of creative freedom. The “People of the Moon” are not fictional, but a dimension within us all: a deeply personal yet universal force, an alternative mindset that emerges when freed from social constraints.



Under moonlight, the album explores anxieties and aspirations through groove and rhythm, expressed in Neapolitan, Arabic, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It moves fluidly from Afro-Cuban influences in “Celavì” to Anatolian textures in “Ma Tu Che Bbuò”, blending highlife guitars with Nu Genea’s signature mandolins-new rhythms filtered through an Italian lens.



The first single “Sciallà” (2025) introduced this direction: dance as catharsis, not escape. The title track reflects a quiet resilience-persistent rather than triumphant. “Onenon”, featuring Tom Misch, channels Mediterranean brit-funk, while “Acelera”, with María José Llergo, evokes a flamenco-tinged pursuit of the unattainable.



“Puleza” recalls Nuova Napoli with driving energy and vintage synths, while “Shway Shway”, sung by Celinatique, captures the album’s orbital flow-measured, rich, and rhythmically complex, echoing afrobeat explorations with Tony Allen.



Melody remains central, as in “Carè”. Across ten tracks, falling, flying, and dancing merge in a suspended groove. Gabriel Prado’s “Ondas Do Mar” embodies this pull: a cyclical motion, like the tides—irresistible, transformative, and alive within us.

SECOND REISSUE ON THIS HEAT’s OWN NEW IMPRINT FOLLOWING ‘THIS HEAT’ (TH01LP) WHICH WAS UNCUT ‘REISSUE OF THE MONTH’ RECENTLY WITH 9/10 REVIEW + 4-PAGE FEATURE WITH Q+A.

*24 bit/96 kHz re-master from original analog tapes.
*Heavyweight 180gm vinyl and heavyweight sleeve with pantone printing to match original 1979 release.
Simon Reynolds on Health and Efficiency:

“For some fans, Health and Efficiency is This Heat’s peak achievement – their most concentrated blast of visceral intensity and wayward experimentalism….Lead track “Health & Efficiency” combines fierce angular rock that fully lives up to Cunningham’s belief that This Heat could become a postpunk King Crimson, with a multi-part babble of vocals, clattering percussive timbres, and found sounds.’’

Flipside “Graphic/Varispeed” is more subdued and hypnotic: a wavering tonescape whose duration depends on whether you play it at 45 rpm or 33 rpm. This reissue reproduces the original release’s striking cover image of a human figure painted in blue by Pete Cobb, along with the cryptic flipside of text in many different languages.

Although widely considered to be Post-Punk’s finest, This Heat actually began performing and recording their music in 1976, the early days of London’s punk era. Within their two albums and an EP they perfected a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock that time has proved to be massively influential, a blueprint for much that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, experimental electronica. Numerous critics have recognised the band's influence on the music of Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, Steven Wilson, Public Image Ltd., Radiohead, Swans, Shellac, Young Knives, Black Dice, Lightning Bolt and numerous other experimental and post-rock bands.

Disbanding in 1982 they have left an undeniable legacy that has only continued to grow in stature and relevance.Having recently passed the 50 year anniversary of their first gig, and the recording of material that appears on their debut album, the group’s surviving members Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward, true to their DIY roots, have set up an imprint to release their recordings for their growing fan base that is increasingly recognising their influential place in music history. 


‘They went beyond punk before punk had properly started…the entire album is a controlled explosion of ideas. Nearly fifty years on, This Heat’s debut is something the world has still not completely caught up with.’ - Simon Reynolds

‘Over the years, there have been bands to play as aggressively, or even as strangely, but very few have been able to rise from their collective influences and histories to create music so singularly distinctive and inspiring.’ – Pitchfork 9/10

‘This Heat sounded like the future then ... and still do now.’ - Dan Snaith (Caribou)

‘This Heat had a certain kind of force the post-punk bands were unable to adequately control without falling foul of rawk excess, and which the punk bands—albeit blitzing and rowdy—were too basic in form to build.’ – John Calvert , The Quietus


Seven years after 2019’s ‘The Dusk Loom’, Petrels returns with a pair of new albums, Infangthief and Outfangthief. The first of these releases, Infangthief, was originally written and recorded in 2022, before being reworked in light of a subsequent album, Outfangthief, due to be released later this year.

The two albums act as companion pieces, mirrors revealing facets of the other, overlapping in sound and subject matter. Though Outfangthief may have been written after Infangthief, it is no mere follow-up, with it's own creation causing a re-visiting and re-working of the earlier album, which in turn informed the writing of its twin.

Taking their titles from Old English legal terms ("thief seized without" and "thief seized within”), the central thread running through both albums is the illusion of assumed human authority - that which is given and that which is taken by force. With Western society seemingly hellbent on willingly embracing a brutally destructive economic model (even in its death throes), these albums attempt - in their own small way - to undertake the essential task of imagining alternative ways of being.

Petrels is the solo project of musician and artist, Oliver Barrett. Since releasing his debut, Haeligewielle, in 2011 (#9 in A Closer Listen's Best Albums of the Decade), Petrels has toured across Europe and shared a stage with the likes of Jóhann Jóhannsson, Tim Hecker, FIRE!, Nate Young (Wolf Eyes), Trouble Books, Demdike Stare, Nadja, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster). Working from his home in Somerset, UK, Barrett has released numerous albums through his Floating Limb imprint, as well as mixing and/or mastering hundreds of releases for the likes of Keiji Haino, Loren Connors & Alan Licht, Judith Hamann, Incapacitants, Mette Rasmussen & Sofia Jernberg, Yasunao Tone and more

“Petrels sidesteps the chilliness found in much of the music of his peers, replacing it instead with an almost spiritual ecstasy, his ravishing synths and almost choral vocal treatments calling out in cosmic, wide eyed wonder at the universe.” – Paul Margree, Louder Than War

For more than 20 years, every CASPIAN album has been driven by a desire to stretch boundaries — a relentless ambition that's resulted in one of post-rock's most revered catalogs and established the Massachusetts quintet as an enduring, global force in the genre's modern era. On CASPIAN, the band’s first album in six years and debut for Wax Bodega, the more unexpected way forward was to stop searching for what they hadn’t yet done and instead trust what had defined them from the beginning.

The six-song, 39-minute effort draws freely from the musical vocabulary the band have spent their career writing: evocative melodic themes, dense textures, swelling crescendos and crushing heaviness that rolls in like a slow-moving storm on the horizon. But they still find new possibilities within those familiar contours, allowing patient development and repetition to carry as much weight as surprise. The nine-minute “Remain” turns a recurring melody into a sweeping study in tension and release, while “No One Left to Tell” layers subtle shifts around a hypnotic tremolo figure and “A Great Fire” sends serpentine guitars crashing into buzzsaw riffs. Even the graceful 3/4-time closer “Waltz for the End,” completed in a half-hour burst of inspiration, reflects the quiet confidence of five musicians comfortable enough in their skin to resist tearing everything down for the sake of reinvention, even as the circumstances surrounding them change dramatically.

For more than 20 years, every CASPIAN album has been driven by a desire to stretch boundaries — a relentless ambition that's resulted in one of post-rock's most revered catalogs and established the Massachusetts quintet as an enduring, global force in the genre's modern era. On CASPIAN, the band’s first album in six years and debut for Wax Bodega, the more unexpected way forward was to stop searching for what they hadn’t yet done and instead trust what had defined them from the beginning.

The six-song, 39-minute effort draws freely from the musical vocabulary the band have spent their career writing: evocative melodic themes, dense textures, swelling crescendos and crushing heaviness that rolls in like a slow-moving storm on the horizon. But they still find new possibilities within those familiar contours, allowing patient development and repetition to carry as much weight as surprise. The nine-minute “Remain” turns a recurring melody into a sweeping study in tension and release, while “No One Left to Tell” layers subtle shifts around a hypnotic tremolo figure and “A Great Fire” sends serpentine guitars crashing into buzzsaw riffs. Even the graceful 3/4-time closer “Waltz for the End,” completed in a half-hour burst of inspiration, reflects the quiet confidence of five musicians comfortable enough in their skin to resist tearing everything down for the sake of reinvention, even as the circumstances surrounding them change dramatically.

TIM HECKER’s latest work approaches a form of secular musical transcendentalism from within the battered temple of spirituality.

Recorded in a church in Reykjavik, Iceland and using a pipe organ as the primary sound source, this new piece is essentially a live recording. In reality, it exists in a nether world between captured live performance and meticulous studio work, melding the two approaches to sonic artifice as a unity. It is in parts a document of air circulating within a wooden room, and also a pagan work of physical resonance within a space once reserved for the hallowed breath of the divine.

While the title of the piece “Hatred of Music” might be a clue, the album is also partly an attempt to confront a pervasive negativity surrounding music. Historical rituals of destroying pianos, mountains of pirated CDRs pushed by bulldozers in Eastern Europe, or the melancholy of the digital music era began as sideline motifs which quickly informed the work on this record. They also really didn't at all. Despite that the context is wide open in such a form of musical abstraction, the substance of these immersive compositions showcases Heckerʼs continued mastery of organizing sound into a visceral near entity. It is an almost physical presence that the listener feels as much as hears.

This work is a significant contribution to Hecker's oeuvre, one which spans over ten years of musical production. Ravedeath is an enigmatic document of beauty and force. The album was recorded mostly over the period of one day in July of 2010. Iceland-based musician Ben Frost assisted with the engineering and performs on this recording.

RECEIVED AN 8.6 BEST NEW MUSIC RATING FROM PITCHFORK.

Across the past decade, KAS has established herself as a unique voice in experimental electronic music, a composer and synthesist whose work dissolves the boundaries between ambient electronica, contemporary classical, composition, and immersive sound design. Her new album “Ruin: It’s Not Just Music” arrives with a distinctive gravitational pull. The record moves with greater physical force, placing rhythm and impact at the centre of its architecture, revealing a more confrontational and embodied dimension of KAS’s musical language.
The first single “Ruin” arrives May 22nd, with the full album released October 2nd via SOMEONE SPECIAL the new label co-founded by KAS.
Where much of KAS’s earlier work explored harmonic environments, the forthcoming album is built around tension and release. Inspired by the sound of drum and bass, breakbeats fracture through dense fields of synthesis, percussive patterns and her signature melodic fragments – motions that feel closer to the kinetic language of club music than the meditative spaces often associated with her past catalogue. The result is a body of work that feels both recognisably hers and newly charged, music that moves through the body as insistently as it engages the mind.
For listeners who first encountered KAS through the glowing synthesis of “Ears” (2016) or the intricate experimental pop of “The Kid” (2017), this direction may feel initially surprising, yet the shift has been quietly unfolding across the past several years. KAS’s practice has steadily expanded beyond the expectations placed upon experimental electronic artists, moving between orchestral composition, audiovisual installations, film scoring, and large-scale commissions while retaining the unmistakable sonic signature that defines her work.
The 2022 albums “I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon” (2022) and “Let’s Turn It Into Sound” (2022) explored a deeply immersive approach to composition, expanded her reputation and instinct for constructing detailed sonic ecosystems while continuing to blur the lines between experimental electronics and contemporary pop structures. KAS’s most recent output has continued to widen that field including the rhythm oriented electronic album “Gush” (2025) and her return to more orchestral roots with “Thoughts on the Future” (2025). Together these releases underscored the breadth of her practice.
Her prolific collaborators and creative partners have ranged from Patti Smith and Suzanne Ciani to Danny Elfman, Tycho, Glass Beams, RY X, Caribou, Four Tet, Reggie Watts, and Max Richter, while her compositions have appeared in projects with Apple, Chanel, Meow Wolf, the BBC Orchestra, and major film and television productions.
On “Ruin: It’s Not Just Music”, that vocabulary becomes more kinetic than ever before. The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass, and dance-floor focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KAS’s work from the beginning. The result is a record that feels equally at home within club culture, contemporary composition, and the experimental spaces that have long championed her artistry.
On May 27th KAS will present a major performance at London’s Barbican Centre alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra, marking the ten-year anniversary of her landmark album Ears. The evening will trace the arc of her creative evolution while also introducing material from the new album.

Environments are sticky, they stick to whatever happens within them. They can’t help it. And neither can you.

Land of the Few and Far Between / Songs for St. Michel is a collection of musical ‘figures’ written and recorded in 2022 and 2023 using a method Lyckle and Kim call the ‘snelkookpan’, translated as the pressure cooker. The ’snelkookpan’ in essence is trying to write and live-record as many musical figures in a given timeframe in a specific place. For ‘Land of the Few and Far Between’ this was an afternoon and evening in an exhibition Kim had curated about collecting and memory in The Hague. For ‘Songs of St. Michel’ this was 6 days in the basement of an art institution in Maastricht where they were joined by Otto de Jong on guitar. The figures are usually worked out by ear, sometimes improvised, sometimes written down, but often they are simply remembered and soon after recording forgotten. For ‘Land of the Few and Far Between’ they recorded ten figures. For ‘Songs for St. Michel’ fifteen. Of each a selection of five ended up on this seven inch.

F. van Abeelen (one of whom’s drawings is pictured on the sleeve of this seven inch and of whom 750 drawings were part of the exhibition mentioned above) was forced as a boy to hide in a basement for years. Only a small window gave access to the outside world. That sliver was his reality. After these years in hiding he began drawing his sliver of reality obsessively. Daily series of similar drawings that he would meticulously catalogue in an organizer. We never met F. Our friend who discovered the drawings in a closet of psychiatric nursing home Dorestad never met F. We only recorded ten musical figures next to 750 drawings by F.

St. Michel is a house that stands on the outskirts of Maastricht. It is built on the floodplains of the river Maas and living there you see the river change daily. It is a river fed by rain. No rain means a low river. Rain means a river that sometimes comes frighteningly close to flooding. Which it sometimes does. Due to the ebb and flow of the Maas, stuff is deposited in the boggy areas that are its floodplains. A shoe, a CD, a drone, some wood.

Places impress themselves onto what you are doing. You become an unwitting prop in the place’s story.

The first ‘snelkookpan’ happened in 2017 in the water-basin of one of the earliest concrete structures in the Netherlands; a bunker that was part of Amsterdam’s defensive line, built around the 1890’s. Something that used to house water was now empty. For three days Kim and Lyckle recorded improvised music there, which is still alive on a hard drive somewhere. In 2020 they recorded ‘the third of May’ at an old pumping station in Den Helder; an eleven part piece of auditory historical-horror which was released by South of North in 2024. Since 2023 Lyckle and Kim have mainly recorded live shows. With a Clarinet, kawai K1, Ipad, organelle, samplers and a variety of instruments curated for their minimal size or odd sound they’ve made chains of brief and improvised mini compositions inspired by browsing environments (digital and otherwise).

Land of the Few and Far Between / Songs for St. Michel adds to this growing collection of recordings for environments that are somehow sticky.

The UK Players & Friends Hills and Valleys, Rivers and Streams (A Tribute to Idren Natural) 9 brand new tracks by The UK Players. Voiced by Singers and Poets who knew Idren Natural personally. Recorded and Mixed by Supa Yout’ at Earth Works Studio, Amsterdam. Sleeve artwork and written testimonials from close friends and associates. Idren Natural aka Ras Natural aka InI Oneness, DJ, Singer, Chanter, Musician, was a pivotal player and pillar of UK/European Roots, Reggae, Dub, Sound System Culture. A humble Rastaman who did so much for so many, inasmuch as inspiring, encouraging, and connecting. He selflessly helped those less fortunate than himself. A strong advocate of the culture and philosophy of Rastafari. He was a commanding presence who lit up the stage, giving JAH all the glory. His passing was a great loss to the community. The UK Players Dub Band formed in 1996. They teamed up with Ras Natural/InI Oneness to record their debut 7” single ‘Further’ for Jah Works with Producer Jah Rej. This single gained exposure via Jah Shaka, Abashanti, and King Shiloh Sound Systems, even the famous Radio 1 DJ ‘John Peel’ played it. More recordings with Jah Rej at Seventh Sense Studio led to the debut album ‘Take Heed’. During the halcyon days of InI Oneness & The UK Players (1997-2004) they toured the UK and Europe, clocking up over 250 gigs in that time. Amongst brethren within the Rastafari community, the band became affectionately known as Ras Naturals band. Friends of Natural like Ras Iyah, Tony Roots, Sister Aisha, Wayne McArthur, and Barry Isaacs (among others) performed with them during this time. Members of InI Oneness & The UK Players never split up, throughout the years they branched out into other projects, reconvening for specials and one offs. Following Idren Naturals passing in 2022, the band stepped up to play his memorial show, where the idea formulated of making a tribute album to him. Ben King offered the use of Earth Works studio to help realise the vision. Work began with longtime live sound engineer Supa Yout’ in March 2024. Jah Rej assisted production on a number of these recordings, and sadly passed during the making of it, the last album he worked on. Various vocalists who were close to Natural, submitted vocals across the following year. The album was mixed and dubbed in March ‘25 at Earth Works by Soupa Yout' & Kingsway. Artwork and written memories/testimonials were then assembled. Everyone involved in the creation of this album knew Idren Natural personally. This album shines a spotlight on his spirit. Carrying songs of tribute, and messages for the times. ALPHA DUB: Every time the band played a gig, Natural would insist on starting with a dub. In that tradition, this album is no different. ‘Mandlion’ passing through the studio, headtopped a Melodica cut on it. Dubbed to the max by Supa Yout! NATURAL VIBE: The ‘Forward Fever’ crew from Belgium were one of the first collectives that Natural affiliated with in Europe. Here, Ras Cloud cleverly weaves all of Naturals song titles into the lyrics, creating a song in itself. WORD & FLESH: Fellowdread was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Now living in Bristol, England, residing with Natural in his last days. His Poetry is rich in inflection, knowledge and wisdom, teachings that spark up the divine. ALL ABOUT LOVE: A pause for contemplation, this one stills the listener. Rootsman Rak’s words warn against complacency, and encourages action. A completely (natural) acoustic track featuring the skilled percussionist Jonah Dan. REMEMBER HIM: Inna Dubplate style, Barry Isaacs toasts to Idren in personal remembrance, reminding us all of the man he was. The track also features snippets of a phone call from Naturals oldest friend ‘Fergie Greenspears’ recounting memories. RISE UP RASTA CHILDREN: The legendary Tony Roots, graces the album with his unique delivery. Natural, The Players, and Tony go back a long way. A song of strength to affirm the soul, and rally against Babylon. Livicated to the one (Natural) SONG FOR THE RIVER MAN: During those halcyon days, many stages were shared with Albaroot, whom the band met whilst on tour in Scotland. Clark Innes (lead singer/songwriter) reminisces about the force of nature that was Natural, times shared, and that knowing, to never meet again. ONE STEP AHEAD: An interpretation of the ‘Look Inside’ riddim by Reuben Addis. Built for Sound System, it is the only track on the album that rolls into a dub. Lyrical Benjie literally entered the studio, rode the riddim without hearing it first, cutting his vocal in one take! A message for the times that sends shivers up your spine. THE PRAYER: Iman Onedub AKA Iman Gebre Iyesus, member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, met Idren Natural at Fairfield House in Bath. Here he seals the album with a recital of the Lord's Prayer in English, with Amharic. His rich textural tones elevated with a one away riddim to carry the listener home.

Much like a teacher, Meryl Streek imparts his knowledge and lived experiences to all who are willing to listen. His third album, ‘Stories They Don’t Teach You At School’, serves as an alternative form of education, delivered through a visceral blend of factual soundbites and raw emotion, loops and samples, guitars and bass. The lyrics resonate with core values of compassion, resilience, and community—themes rarely explored within a classroom setting or seen in today's fragmented society. By prioritising conviction over commercial success, the Dublin artist's outspokenness may invite controversy. Yet beneath the fervor lies a profound desire for positive social change at home in Ireland, and beyond.
Meryl Streek returned to Darkland Studios in Dublin to fine-tune the recordings previously made in a shed at the back of his ma's garden. Here he continued the genre-blurring nature of his earlier work, enticing listeners toward dissonant landscapes and hypnotic rhythms. Gentle piano tones collide with abrasive synths, creating a striking tension between beauty and noise. Streek tempers his rage when appropriate, integrating atmospheric textures and pop sensibilities into his ever-expanding sonic collage.
As is tradition with any Meryl Streek record, ‘Stories They Don’t Teach You At School’ unearths many uncomfortable truths. ‘Rotten Fruit’ examines media manipulation and the numbing proliferation of misinformation, all soundtracked by synth-punk. With gliding keys and a crunchy bassline, ‘Council Estates’ critiques systemic government failures affecting the working class. ‘Kelly’ is a slice of electronica that details an ongoing criminal investigation, currently classified as a “Contested Cause of Death”. The indie pop of 'The Chancer' brings much-needed attention to landlord politicians. As the album progresses, the mission remains absolute: to provide a voice for the voiceless.
To amplify these narratives, Meryl Streek handpicked a diverse group of collaborators for the project. ‘Rotten Fruit’ features Steve Ignorant of anarcho-punk collective CRASS. ‘Depression’ opens with a touching recording of the late Liam Norton, close friend and former touring companion, while Pete Holidai of The Radiators From Space contributes guitars on the song. Comedian Phill Jupitus provides the spoken outro for ‘The Chancer'. ‘Housing For All’ incorporates audio from Derelict Ireland campaigners Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry. Venn Records owner and Gallows guitarist Laurent ‘Lags’ Barnard joins forces with Adebisi Shank bassist Vinny McCreith on the aggressive ‘Bullet,’ while Sophie Porter of Other Half provides bass guitar for ‘Life is Not a Rehearsal’. The album concludes with a three-minute spoken word piece by Frankie McNamara, the viral creator behind ‘Meditations for the Anxious Mind’.
In her 1990 protest anthem “Black Boys on Mopeds,” the late Sinead O’Connor warned, “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave”. With this release, Meryl Streek firmly holds the shovel.

The Yummy Fur’s first album of new material in over 25 years is seductive and ambiguous; a fast-paced flip through scenes from art, myth, life and fantasy; a witty whole made from glittering scraps. The band’s original incarnation – fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist John McKeown from 1992 to 1999 – morphed from making quick-hit cartoon-art songs to Eno and Cale-influenced creepers, populated by characters from McKeown’s life in Glasgow and the films, books and poetry that he lived a parallel life through. Everybody Talks About The Weather delights in using every past iteration of the band as potent collage material: a melee of sounds and ideas existing at once, revealing themselves then dipping back into hiding.
Recorded by the original core trio of McKeown, Brian MacDougall (guitar) and Paul Thomson (drums), Everybody Talks About The Weather comes 17 years after the band reformed for sporadic live shows, and seven years after the release of their sorta-greatest hits compilation Piggy Wings (Rock Action). Ten tracks long with nothing to spare, it is as condensed and vital as their best songs, with a new clarity of sound that allows their ambiguities to come into the light.
The album begins with “Cogs”, a taunting inquisition from within. As McKeown stages a fight between his id and ego, the tension heats up between conversational guitar lines and minimalist repetition; threatening sing-song melody and real, palpable menace. The band members are forced in tandem only to break apart, sustaining a genuine sense of just-hidden danger throughout the whole record – except, arguably, “Headphones”, a looser moment which sees McKeown make an existential something out of nothing while waiting for someone in the car (“I should have brought a book.../My ears are bleeding from the compression on your album”)
The songs are riots of reference: “Unity Over Europe” is a slyly complex two act play about the Mitford sisters – Diana, Unity, and Nancy, in a wink to the YF canon – smashing tragic biographical detail together with allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Francis Bacon. Pynchon is also lifted to serve “Blue Sunshine”, a collision of school shooters, serial killers and fictional fuck-ups (“Fast forward to Compton/Fast forward to Pynchon/Fast forward to Columbine'”) whose buzzy guitar lines are taunting and confrontational like a smarmy teenager. The innocuous title of “My Lasagne” belies a song that exists in several time periods at once: a visit to see Guernica, 50 people with their backs to the portrait of Dora Maar; the time that Picasso painted from; the Reina Sofia and the dirty streets of the Malasaña; myth-making musicians and the myths they’re riffing off overlapping and leering at each other.
All this could be laboured in lesser hands, but cultural verbosity is second nature to The Yummy Fur, who transform all this source material into songs that are weird, sexy, funny and absurd. Meaning is not happily understood or flattened. Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation accompanied McKeown as he wrote this album, and she’s paraphrased in “Semolina Ballerina”, the album’s justification of artistic ambiguity. Thomson’s motorik beat leads a gathering of back-and-forth instrumental phrases – including a wiry contribution on saxophone – embodying the futility of trying to parse something definitive from repeated action. “Listen to the very first thing that’s in your head,” Sontag-via-McKeown commands directly, then slinks sideways: “Interpretation is a conversation in an unmade bed”
The album features two more focused portraits, or at least The Yummy Fur’s version of such a thing. “Wanda” merges the life of filmmaker Barbara Loden and the title character of her semi-autobiographical 1970 feature film, with Loden’s then-husband Elia Kazan joining the fray of no-good men in her film. It’s a mix of adaptation and avant-criticism, with McKeown’s wordplay and mannered pronunciation mirroring the way that non-fiction and fiction twist around each other in the song. The title track is a series of vignettes and impressions from the lives of the band’s ‘90s inner circle, positing painter Mac McNaughton as a kind of Falstaffian ringleader. As with Piggy Wings and the recent single “New T-Shirt”, McNaughton painted the cover of Everybody Talks About The Weather – like the album’s music, the image of a coy girl in a white dress is an uncanny amalgamation of styles, suggestions and references just out of reach, as though seen in an art museum in a dream.
The album ends with two reads of the same frustration. “King of Nothing” is the closest The Yummy Fur will ever get to sludge-rock: the band melts together into a dusty, dreary haze as McKeown drowns in a drudgery of personal struggle (“Two jumpers on in Babylon/And only cats to talk to”) and the rhythmic toppling of heroes (Rowlands, Duvall, Munro). The majority of visible dirt is cleaned off for “Say Hello”, an uncharacteristic depiction of throwing the windows open after a dark night of the soul. Here, the situation is still cold and hard (“When the sun burns gold, but the heat never reaches your fingertips”) but it feels surmountable. Everybody Talks About The Weather is an unpredictable album from an unpredictable group, but ending on a moment of almost uncomplicated light is maybe its biggest surprise. - Claire Biddles (2026)

The Yummy Fur’s first album of new material in over 25 years is seductive and ambiguous; a fast-paced flip through scenes from art, myth, life and fantasy; a witty whole made from glittering scraps. The band’s original incarnation – fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist John McKeown from 1992 to 1999 – morphed from making quick-hit cartoon-art songs to Eno and Cale-influenced creepers, populated by characters from McKeown’s life in Glasgow and the films, books and poetry that he lived a parallel life through. Everybody Talks About The Weather delights in using every past iteration of the band as potent collage material: a melee of sounds and ideas existing at once, revealing themselves then dipping back into hiding.
Recorded by the original core trio of McKeown, Brian MacDougall (guitar) and Paul Thomson (drums), Everybody Talks About The Weather comes 17 years after the band reformed for sporadic live shows, and seven years after the release of their sorta-greatest hits compilation Piggy Wings (Rock Action). Ten tracks long with nothing to spare, it is as condensed and vital as their best songs, with a new clarity of sound that allows their ambiguities to come into the light.
The album begins with “Cogs”, a taunting inquisition from within. As McKeown stages a fight between his id and ego, the tension heats up between conversational guitar lines and minimalist repetition; threatening sing-song melody and real, palpable menace. The band members are forced in tandem only to break apart, sustaining a genuine sense of just-hidden danger throughout the whole record – except, arguably, “Headphones”, a looser moment which sees McKeown make an existential something out of nothing while waiting for someone in the car (“I should have brought a book.../My ears are bleeding from the compression on your album”)
The songs are riots of reference: “Unity Over Europe” is a slyly complex two act play about the Mitford sisters – Diana, Unity, and Nancy, in a wink to the YF canon – smashing tragic biographical detail together with allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Francis Bacon. Pynchon is also lifted to serve “Blue Sunshine”, a collision of school shooters, serial killers and fictional fuck-ups (“Fast forward to Compton/Fast forward to Pynchon/Fast forward to Columbine'”) whose buzzy guitar lines are taunting and confrontational like a smarmy teenager. The innocuous title of “My Lasagne” belies a song that exists in several time periods at once: a visit to see Guernica, 50 people with their backs to the portrait of Dora Maar; the time that Picasso painted from; the Reina Sofia and the dirty streets of the Malasaña; myth-making musicians and the myths they’re riffing off overlapping and leering at each other.
All this could be laboured in lesser hands, but cultural verbosity is second nature to The Yummy Fur, who transform all this source material into songs that are weird, sexy, funny and absurd. Meaning is not happily understood or flattened. Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation accompanied McKeown as he wrote this album, and she’s paraphrased in “Semolina Ballerina”, the album’s justification of artistic ambiguity. Thomson’s motorik beat leads a gathering of back-and-forth instrumental phrases – including a wiry contribution on saxophone – embodying the futility of trying to parse something definitive from repeated action. “Listen to the very first thing that’s in your head,” Sontag-via-McKeown commands directly, then slinks sideways: “Interpretation is a conversation in an unmade bed”
The album features two more focused portraits, or at least The Yummy Fur’s version of such a thing. “Wanda” merges the life of filmmaker Barbara Loden and the title character of her semi-autobiographical 1970 feature film, with Loden’s then-husband Elia Kazan joining the fray of no-good men in her film. It’s a mix of adaptation and avant-criticism, with McKeown’s wordplay and mannered pronunciation mirroring the way that non-fiction and fiction twist around each other in the song. The title track is a series of vignettes and impressions from the lives of the band’s ‘90s inner circle, positing painter Mac McNaughton as a kind of Falstaffian ringleader. As with Piggy Wings and the recent single “New T-Shirt”, McNaughton painted the cover of Everybody Talks About The Weather – like the album’s music, the image of a coy girl in a white dress is an uncanny amalgamation of styles, suggestions and references just out of reach, as though seen in an art museum in a dream.
The album ends with two reads of the same frustration. “King of Nothing” is the closest The Yummy Fur will ever get to sludge-rock: the band melts together into a dusty, dreary haze as McKeown drowns in a drudgery of personal struggle (“Two jumpers on in Babylon/And only cats to talk to”) and the rhythmic toppling of heroes (Rowlands, Duvall, Munro). The majority of visible dirt is cleaned off for “Say Hello”, an uncharacteristic depiction of throwing the windows open after a dark night of the soul. Here, the situation is still cold and hard (“When the sun burns gold, but the heat never reaches your fingertips”) but it feels surmountable. Everybody Talks About The Weather is an unpredictable album from an unpredictable group, but ending on a moment of almost uncomplicated light is maybe its biggest surprise. - Claire Biddles (2026)

Pressure is the medium of wind players. Wind instruments all sound thanks to pressure differentials, whether that’s the rush of wind over a lip plate or a steady, buzzing exhalation through pursed lips. Ka Baird and Chris Ryan Williams (HxH) are wind players well- schooled in the power of using pressure and movement to amplify the mystery of an invisible force animating a metal tube. They augment their instruments, flute and trumpet respectively, with electronics, sometimes obscuring the acoustic sound source, sometimes making it hyperreal. Flutters of lip and tongue slither over the listener’s ear, and sustained tones become a dense fog, pushing on other kinds of visceral, emotional pressure points.

On Enthalpy, Baird and Williams’ first album as a duo, the energy they conjure feels barely contained, the pressure built up to a breaking point before spilling out in multiple directions at various speeds. They borrow the title from thermodynamics, referring to the total energy of a system based on its pressure and volume. The music flies out in bursts; it seeps and oozes, flows with intention. It is an incredibly rhythmic work without any hint of meter, full of sounds that punctuate with the thud of a dart hitting a bullseye. Williams’ capability to conjure swirling atmospherics, as well as his remarkable ability to pull fragments of melody from the haze, fit puzzle-like into Baird’s exclamations and the eruption of electronics that often dovetail them. The duo draws on tones from nearly the entire range of human hearing, from nimble but bulbous throbs of sub-bass to pinprick flickers of ultra-high end.

The sessions that produced Enthalpy were completely improvised, showcasing a degree of mind-meld that belies each participant’s thrill at approaching the unknown. This isn’t a casual conversation, but an omnidirectional tangle that ties and reties itself into new knots as the album progresses. Williams and Baird have both become ubiquitous presences throughout the New York City experimental music communities, collaborating with innumerable others and learning how their unique approaches work in tandem with similarly expansive thinkers and players. Even in the album’s most spacious moments, there’s a tension between the feeling of being unmoored and yet completely locked in, like the abyss is just one more river to cross. They ford it together before moving on to the next idea in lock step.

For the listener, Enthalpy is often felt in the body as much as it reverberates within the ears. We’re tossed from side to side, made to shoulder the impact of detonating electronics, absorbing these sounds with the feet, gut, and crown. Baird reaches into the back of their throat for guttural growls, and we can almost feel the scratch. As we tread the border of the synthesthetic, it's a reminder of the physical nature of sound, that the space between our ears and the speakers is its own enthalpic system of energy conduction. Move with it, let it move you, and see how it feels.

Tucked in the heart of Koreatown, Los Angeles, lies The Libra Hotel—the titular architecture of Nick Malkin's new album and site of his musical and psychogeographic exploration. Unlike most musical "site-specific" studies, Malkin remains wholly ambivalent to the documentarian approach, instead sharpening an auteur-like focus on the site as a conceptual and highly expressive backdrop. The Libra is musically explored as a space that houses a noir fragmentation of identity—the exhausted trope of a complicated protagonist walking through rain-soaked street corners and fumy neon lights—where an inner monologue is rendered in both miniature and at a cosmic scale. Casting aside stifling tropes around field recording, ambient, and improvised music, Malkin's work finds its own unique fidelity and emotional core through the assembly and reassembly of memory. Nearly every sound on the album—from frayed saxophones, lambent pianos, and dissected jazz drum kits—are multiplied, shattered, and reconstituted into shapes that adorn The Libra in a motion-blurred fog. The narrative of the Hotel suddenly appears as if out of the mist, with intersecting characters interacting within its walls by happenstance. Adminst the languid set pieces, wraith-like sonic grains gravitate around wide subbass beams that give structural form to The Libra, a narrative tension like when a scene is shot from hundreds of different perspectives: an image both luminous and veiled.

Much like Frank Sinatra's own spatial residency immortalized on "Live at The Sands," "At The Libra Hotel" showcases an exuberant view of entertainment, hospitality, and a form of masculinity, one that can quickly detourn into darkness. Knowing this, Malkin extracts a melancholic core out of The Libra locale. The flickering shadows of American decadence are shown in their ephemeral honesty, lines that trace how even in everyday life virtue is tested, sanity is tested, even reality is tested within the confines of desire, within the night. The album is draped in fleeting textures, carefully arranged with a trance-like microtonality, the faint inflections and articulations of a jazz band cascading into dissipated stillness. Voicemails about changed locations and covert eavesdropping on guests' whispered conversations provide an atmosphere of missed connection and voyeurism—a purloined letter of desire receding into a vanishing point. Like the music itself, The Hotel, a chapel perilous at the intersection of desolation row, the center of it all, yet simultaneously at the edge of town, becomes a structure between libidinous virtuality and actuality—our inevitable half-light.

Ultimately, the pensive atmosphere of "At The Libra Hotel," powerfully asserts a plea for the kinds of intimacy only possible in transient spaces. Here, memory cascades into a force that feels like something supernatural, perhaps even religious, yet always subject to the infidelity of our imagination. Here, the album opens into its primary psychodrama, the transient nature of subjectivity itself and how this becomes fractured in the tumult between our commitments and desires. Within this nocturnal space, to quote Louise Bourgeois, "you pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture."

With "Jamaican (Bam Bam)," HUGEL and SOLTO breathe new life into Sister Nancy's iconic anthem - a bold, rhythm-charged reinterpretation built for the modern dancefloor. It grips from the first beat: dynamic drumming, crisp claps, and a bassline that rolls deep with sway and sensuality. Layers tighten and unfold, teasing the body as electronic tinctures flicker beneath, building lift and slow, simmering tension. Through it all, Sister Nancy's voice cuts steady and alive, grounding the track in its roots while driving it forward. The energy keeps rising vibrant, climactic, and free. "Jamaican (Bam Bam)" smolders from within, a kinetic force that turns motion into release.

Artwork by Rachael D’Alessandro. Words by Marie Floro. Executive Producer Mimmo Falcone. Distribution by Muting The Noise.

Since their debut, Rising Insane have evolved from a fierce independent quintet into a global heavy-hitter, amassing millions of streams across their previous catalog. Their journey to the top has been defined by elite company, having shared stages with genre icons like Papa Roach, Of Mice & Men, and Stray From the Path, transforming them into an unstoppable live force. This momentum is now reaching a fever pitch with their upcoming album, Deathrace. The record includes the standout track "Good Enough" (feat. Matt Flood of Caskets), which proved the band's immense reach by surpassing one million streams right at its release, alongside the dark and mature "Error" (feat. Steven Jones of Bleed From Within). Fans can also look forward to explosive new collaborations on the album with ACCVSED and David Schneider (The Butcher Sisters). Deathrace marks the band’s most radical chapter yet, stripping away polished refinement in favor of raw power and primal riffs. It is a limit-breaking statement that finally pushes their sound to the absolute limit - Rising Insane have never stood still, but now they are finally flooring it.

We’re proud to present Further Reflexions, the new EP from our young striker Roto, featuring a closing B2 collaboration with Nulek.

Across three forward-thinking solo cuts, Roto explores a trance-driven language infused with techno energy and hypnotic textures. The EP moves through tension, transformation, and emotional intensity, balancing dancefloor functionality with introspective atmospheres.

“Evolution and change are part of life. Evolution comes naturally; change is an unavoidable force. You either allow it to reshape you, or resist until you succumb to it. This is the philosophy behind this EP.” — Roto

The release closes with a collaboration that has already become a signature within the label’s identity. Nulek and Roto unite once again to deliver a dark, stomping B2 cut where the electron analog power meets the raw pulse of bass guitar. Together they shape a dense and immersive sonic landscape and a warning whispered from within: avoid the devil.

“Wavebreaker” is a magnificent post-punk and minimal wave album originally self-released in 2024 by Orus Boris — a brilliant work that unquestionably deserved a proper vinyl edition for both its musical depth and outstanding technical quality. Built around a truly exceptional production, “Wavebreaker” moves in line with the finest contemporary wave sounds while constantly expanding its own universe. The album never feels nostalgic or predictable. Instead, it reshapes its influences into something fluid, sharp, and deeply personal, refusing to remain confined to a single language. Alongside its minimal wave foundations, the record introduces subtle incursions into darker electronic territories such as dark electro aesthetics, making each track feel unexpected and constantly evolving. Melancholy collides with tension, elegance with aggression, precision with emotional weight. The result is an immersive and surprising listening experience from beginning to end—a remarkable work that confirms Orus Boris as one of the most exciting and essential voices to follow within the new wave underground. Presented in ONE-OFF truly limited edition of 300 copies lacquered pressed on 180 gr. high quality solid BLACK vinyl. All tracks have been specially remastered and mastered for vinyl by Daniel Hallhuber at Young and Cold Studios (Germany).

Ancient Infinity Orchestra return with their third album, It’s Always About Liberation, a new record that deepens the vision of their acclaimed recent work while moving into darker, more searching emotional territory.

Conceived as a partner to It’s Always About Love, this new body of work shares its predecessor’s generosity and spiritual openness, but carries a different charge. Where the previous album focused on healing and warmth, It’s Always About Liberation is largely animated by struggle, perseverance and the desire for transformation while still offering a path to betterment. It is music made in full awareness of a fractured world, yet unwilling to surrender to it.

Like It’s Always About Love the album title draws inspiration from words spoken by Moor Mother during their 2024 We Out Here festival performance that deeply affected bandleader Ozzy Moysey: “It’s always about love / It’s always about liberation.” Those twin ideas became a framework for the two albums Ancient Infinity Orchestra were creating. If one album explored love as repair, this one explores liberation as movement, continually striving toward freedom, clarity and deeper connection.
The 16-member ensemble is led by double bassist and composer Ozzy, with a distinctive line-up that explains their sound better than any artificial genre divisions: two double basses, harp, saxophones, clarinets, violin, viola, cello, oboe, flutes, mandolin, congas, piano, drum kit, with bells, shakers and other percussion instruments scattered on the floor of live sets and recording sessions, ready for members to use whenever the spirit takes them.

This orchestration, and the overlap between membership and friendship, gives Ancient Infinity Orchestra a sound that is at once expansive and intimate, earthy, and cosmic, constantly shifting yet grounded in shared intention. The attention to intention and the inviting sonic world connects the music to artists ranging from Alabaster dePlume to Gondwana label boss Matthew Halsall.
Gradually, the Orchestra became a grounding force in the emerging jazz scene in Leeds, bringing together individuals from different musical backgrounds co-founding the Café Oto-inspired Limpet Club or co-hosting the monthly Sonic Plunge (‘a platform for adventurous experimentation’) and co-founding the Leeds Improvisers Orchestra. Additionally, the ensemble acted as a bridge between musicians in Brighton and Leeds, after Ozzy spent a stint back on the south coast between 2020 and 2022.

Their debut, River of Light, was a vibrant celebration of togetherness recorded in three days and released on Gondwana in 2023. A Maida Vale session for Jamie Cullum’s BBC Radio 2 show brought them to a broader audience, as did bookings at North Sea Jazz Festival and Gretchen, Berlin. Since then, Ancient Infinity Orchestra has become a by-word for music that could be framed as ‘spiritual jazz’. Whilst Ozzy avoids the phrase when describing his music, he’s crystal clear that his heroes are associated with those words – citing Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pharoah Saunders, Coltrane (Alice and John), and Don Cherry as major influences.

Across trance-like meditations, rising grooves, moments of grief and collective uplift, It’s Always About Liberation speaks to the battle within the mind as much as the inequalities of the wider world. It acknowledges the darkness but lets connection and creativity have the last word Ancient Infinity Orchestra is a gathering of voices, traditions, and energies converging into something timeless. Their music is a journey inward and outward, always reaching toward the universal.

A catalyst for all sorts of noise-making endeavors, Bob Bellerue embraces chaos as a positive force. As a musician, he harnesses the violent timbres and textures from feedback clashing against piano wires, amplifiers, metal, zithers, electronics etc. He's also been central in harnessing community through his long standing Ende Tymes festival in New York, providing an intersectional platform for all voices to utter their noise. To a polite society, things such as chaos, noise, and anarchy threaten the normative structures that can assert control and maintain power over others. Bellerue qualifies his practice as a form of sonic animism, in which engages with that which is unheard in materials, equipment, and their relationships, developing a process of amplified discovery. The unhinged, the unquantifiable, and the unknowable are all possible outcomes in Bellerue's expansive works.

Chaos Is A Law is a macrotonal album, whose expressive de-centralization originates from rasping noise, intense textural accretions, brutalist drone, and inharmonic ambience. For all of the sustained harmonics and dissonant frequencies, the album is in constant motion, with Bellerue pushing dynamics that build, rupture, collapse and reform with an almost organic morphology. At times, it boils with a feral intensity. At others, its muscularity collapses into peculiar almost half-melodic figures, mutated within all the distortion. One could look to the free noise practitioners from New Zealand (e.g. A Handful Of Dust, Birchville Cat Motel, Surface of the Earth) or to the alchemical dronescaping of Stephen O'Malley and Organum. Yet, Bellerue's work maintains a bespoke tactility that is uniquely his.

In Bellerue's words, "The universe is a feedback loop. Creating and destroying. Growing and decaying. Loving and dying. Expanding and contracting. The big bang is the end result of everything merging together in the biggest black hole ever and then erupting into being over and over again. Praise chaos!"

Dreamlike longing, the lament of what may be forever lost, and unrelenting rage define the dark rock band from Stuttgart Vast moments of calm are built only to be torn down unexpectedly, demanding the listener's full emotional commitment. Since their 2019 debut EP Black Awakening, which received strong press coverage and worldwide airplay, ASTRAYA have continued to guide listeners toward new horizons of realization. Their fully handmade wall of sound is crowned by the ethereal vocals of Melina Abele, shining like sun rays through black clouds. In 2024, ASTRAYA joined forces with the Italian label These Hands Melt, under which they are now releasing their highly anticipated second LP "Atropine".

The Hacker teams up with Rein for ‘We Come Alive’ on Rekids. French producer The Hacker joins forces with vocalist, songwriter, and producer Rein for ‘We Come Alive’ on Rekids, arriving 19th June 2026. A longstanding figure within the underground, The Hacker helped shape the early electroclash movement through his analogue-heavy sound and influential releases on labels including Turbo Recordings and Dark Entries, while Rein has built an international reputation through a darkwave-influenced sound that blurs underground and crossover electronics, alongside releases on Boysnoize Records and live appearances with Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb.

Built as a tribute to the dance floor “We Come Alive” explores the feeling of liberation and connection that only exists late at night. Think an Alison Moyet-inspired vocal over stripped-back machine funk somewhere between LFO and Kraftwerk.” - The Hacker & Rein

The Hacker & Rein’s ‘We Come Alive’ pairs sharp, angular rhythms with punishing low-end pressure as acid lines twist through scintillating percussion and jacked-up drums. Amid the machine-heavy intensity, Rein’s vocals cut through the mix with clarity and emotion, lending a euphoric edge to the track’s raw, strobe-lit energy.

ALERT: BIG 90s ITALIAN RAVE COMP - a lot of very in demand tunes on here.

Navigators

Franco Falsini and the Interactive Test Universe

There are musicians who follow their time.

And then there are those who seem to move along a different trajectory—like navigators crossing sonic eras without ever truly belonging to any one of them. The story of Franco Falsini belongs to the latter. It is a story that begins long before raves, before techno, before the word “electronic” had even become a recognizable musical genre. A story that moves across continents, technologies, and sonic visions, eventually arriving at a small creative laboratory born in Italy in the early 1990s: Interactive Test. This compilation is a fragment of that universe. But as often happens with the hidden histories of music, understanding it requires going back. Far back.

The Beginning: Machines, Tape and Space

In the late 1960s Franco Falsini leaves Italy and moves to the United States. It is not merely a geographical journey—it is also a journey into a new idea of music. At the time, synthesizers are only just emerging from research laboratories. Multitrack tape recorders allow musicians to build entire sonic worlds on their own. Technology is still far from standardized: every studio is almost an experimental workshop. In Virginia, Falsini builds one of his own. Among cables, oscillators, electric guitars and reels of magnetic tape, a kind of music begins to take shape that resembles nothing else being made at the time. It is not simply rock, and it is not yet truly electronic. It moves somewhere in the space between the two. Out of these explorations emerges Sensations' Fix, the project through which Falsini releases a series of albums during the 1970s. Records that seem to come from a parallel dimension: cosmic landscapes, electronically treated guitars, synthesizers drifting like satellites. Many years later those albums would be rediscovered as visionary works. But at the time they were simply the result of relentless curiosity. A curiosity that would never fade.

The City That Never Sleeps

In the 1980s Falsini’s trajectory leads him to New York. The city is a sonic organism in constant transformation. In its clubs and recording studios something entirely new is beginning to take shape: music built from drum machines, sequencers, and samplers, created for the body before the living room. It is the dawn of modern dance culture. Falsini works as a sound engineer, producer and experimenter. From close range he observes electronic music transforming into a global language. Machines become more accessible, computers begin entering studios, and rhythm takes on an increasingly central role. Yet even in this phase Falsini does not simply follow what is happening. He absorbs. Observes. Reimagines. When he eventually returns to Italy, he brings back not only technical experience but also a clear vision: the conviction that electronic music is an open space, a territory still waiting to be explored.

Tuscany, Early 1990s

At the beginning of the 1990s something is happening in Italy as well. In clubs, abandoned industrial warehouses and clandestine parties, a new scene is beginning to form. It is rave culture: a spontaneous movement bringing together DJs, producers and listeners in a collective experience driven by rhythm, technology, and creative freedom. It is within this context that Franco Falsini, together with his brother Riccardo, creates Interactive Test.

The name almost sounds like a scientific experiment. In many ways, it is. Interactive Test does not emerge as a traditional record label. It begins as a laboratory—a place where ideas, sounds and musical identities can be tested and explored. Around the Falsini studio in Tuscany a small constellation of artists and DJs begins to gather, helping to shape the sound of Italy’s emerging electronic scene. Among them are Andrea Giuditta, Francesco Farfa, Gabry Fasano, Roby Mastelloni, Roby J and many others. Each brings a different musical sensibility. But they all share the same intuition: electronic music is not a genre. It is a language.

The Laboratory of Identities

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Interactive Test universe is its constant play with identity. Franco Falsini releases music under several different names: Open Space, Youth Wave, Agent Fylfoyt, Man Myth Magic. These are not simply pseudonyms.

They are different sonic perspectives, as if each project were a window opening onto a parallel musical universe. Open Space, for example, explores more atmospheric and visionary territories. Youth Wave moves between electronic groove and club-oriented rhythms. Other projects experiment with digital psychedelia or hypnotic techno textures. Interactive Test becomes something more than a label. it becomes an ecosystem.

Domestic Machines, Infinite Worlds

Looking back today at the technology used in those productions, one might almost smile. Many tracks were created on Amiga computers, MIDI sequencers and analog synthesizers wired together in home studios—tools that appear modest when compared to today’s digital possibilities.

Yet precisely these limitations became a creative force. Every sound had to be built, shaped and reinvented. Sequences developed slowly, almost like living organisms. The tracks did not always follow traditional dance music structures; often they felt like genuine sonic journeys. Music built from space.

A Hidden Constellation

Many of the records released by Interactive Test in the 1990s remained for years almost invisible objects, circulating quietly among DJs, collectors, and devoted listeners. Yet it is precisely this underground existence that helped preserve them. Listening again today, one perceives something rare: the feeling of music that does not fully belong to its own time. Music suspended between different eras. Perhaps because it comes from a vision that both precedes and transcends trends.

Continuing the Journey

Looking at Franco Falsini’s entire path—from the electronic psychedelia of Sensations’ Fix to the rave culture of the 1990s—a surprisingly coherent line emerges.

A line defined by exploration.

Each project, each pseudonym, each record appears as a new route within the same great sonic voyage.

Interactive Test was one of its stations.

A laboratory.
A community.
A creative platform.

This compilation gathers some of its traces.

Not as a simple archive of the past, but as a map of a musical territory that continues to expand even today.

Like all true sonic explorations.

Stanz Amor delivers a five-track EP that blends crunchy sound design, tribal influences and driving grooves into a cohesive statement of energy, movement and atmosphere. Hailing from Blackpool UK, Stanz Amor emerged in 2023 with a distinctly old-school approach, channeling groove, rhythm and intensity into a modern context, which he showcases on his Backspin Records debut EP 'Mercurial'. ??Opening with 'Kong', the EP sets the tone with an old school spirit reimagined through a contemporary lens. Loopy structures, banging percussion and textured, gritty elements create a hypnotic flow designed for peak-time moments. 'Mercurial' raises the intensity, propelled by fast-paced hi-hats and shimmering rides that injectconstant motion, while a rolling low end gives the track serious weight. A striking Latin vocal lingers throughout, leaving a lasting impression long after the track fades. On the B-side 'Count' shifts the energy into a groove led by rolling bongos, underpinned by a heavy sub and catchy, repeating vocals that lock into a tight, circular rhythm. 'Yawhoo' follows with a punchy kick, rumbling foundation and driving percussion, elevated by a cheeky vocal and a whistle straight out of the 90s rave era, adding a playful, nostalgic edge. The closing track is a remix of 'Count' by Steve Redhead, who reinterprets the original with forceful yet hypnotic percussion and finely detailed vocal work. A Belgian techno mainstay since the early 2000s, Redhead is known for his uncompromising, groove-driven sound and lasting influence within the underground. ??With this release, Stanz Amor delivers a focused and effective collection built on groove, repetition and dancefloor functionality. Released on Regal's Backspin Records, a label rooted in the underground and dedicated to honoring techno's origins while pushing its future, the project balances nostalgia with modern clarity, designed to resonate in clubs and leave a lasting impact.